Pimcore Inspire Global Partner Conference 2019 — a Whopping Success

Key Highlights of Pimcore Inspire 2019

The conference was a huge success, bringing together our global partners, developers, and community members under one roof to experience the fantastic work happening around Pimcore and what is the future product roadmap of this most popular open-source DXP platform.

The conference was jampacked with 2 keynotes - one from Gartner (on Day 1), and another from Forrester (on Day 2) - along with a couple of roundtable discussions, multiple live demos, technical sessions, latest Pimcore news/happenings, and 10+ partner case study presentations. The event was full of life with lots of learnings, fun, and inspiring takeaways. 

Moreover, attendees had a really great time for one-to-one interaction, knowledge-sharing, and networking opportunities during a pre-opening evening, a dinner party, and after event refreshment. The event finished with the award ceremony and certifications. 'Case Study of the Year' award went to elbkapitäne for Küche&Co / Otto Group. 'Partner of the Year' was awarded to Ateles.

GARTNER KEYNOTE: AGE OF THE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE PLATFORMS

The conference was kicked off with an opening DXP keynote on “Future of Digital Experience Platforms”, presented by Mike Lowndes, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner

After that, a roundtable discussion was held among three panelists Mike Lowndes from Gartner, Dietmar, CEO of Pimcore, and Temel Kayaoglu, CEO of the Group of Analysts, are all experts in digital transformation topics. They discussed the importance of digital experience platforms for digital agencies and system integrators, the upcoming next big things, and the advantages of open-source technology and service-oriented software architectures for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

THE STORY OF PIMCORE

Dietmar Rietsch, CEO of Pimcore, shared personal insights into the story that made Pimcore big. He talked about the pitfalls, hurdles which they had to overcome in more than one decade of Pimcore…and inventing a new software category when it had not even been yet imagined. The triumphant story about building an open-source powered platform.

PRODUCT NEWS & ROADMAP

A lot has happened at Pimcore in the past 12 months, and many new features have been added by the core team and our awesome community. With the latest and most powerful version 6 of the Pimcore platform, we have completely rethought digital experience management. Bernhard Rusch and Christian Fasching shared Pimcore roadmap and the new AI and personalization features.

30+ releases, 230+ features and improvements, 900+ tickets resolved (more than ever), 760+ pull requests, and UI improvements. 

Along with exciting Pimcore 6, the Rethought DXP, there are many amazing features in Commerce, CaaS, DXP, and personalization/targeting. Do give them a try.

Exciting Part: Our brand new Pimcore Academy to make learning fun-loving and exciting for partners, developers, and community members.

Next Big Things: Machine Learning Interfaces, Native Cloud Functionalities, Improving Tests, and Translation Providers

What the Future Holds for Pimcore: Advanced DAM Features, DXP Enhancements, and Asset Portal 2.0 

LIVE DEMO: INTRODUCING THE DATA HUB

Pimcore Data Hub completes our vision of a completely API-driven ecosystem for data, content, and commerce as-a-service. Divesh Pahuja showcased some insights of real-life use cases of this new module through a live demo of how to build custom GraphQL API endpoints quickly in a graphical user interface. It now enables you to personalize digital experiences at any customer touchpoint.

PIMCORE & MACHINE LEARNING

In this session, Christian Fasching, Pimcore Chief Product Officer, Paul Hörmann, a student, and Andreas Grünwald, from Elements, showcased a live demo of how state of the art free and open-source machine learning tools such as Google TensorFlow, Vision API, and Amazon image recognition can be used to intelligently automate image tagging, product classification, duplicate detection, eCommerce recommendation and more. Pimcore provides interfaces to available providers and collaborates with Universities to stay ahead of the technology curve.

SCALING WITH CLOUD DEPLOYMENT

Deploying Pimcore to cloud hosting providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, or Azure is one of the key strategies in global high-load enterprise data management scenarios. Pimcore Chief Solutions Officer Rakesh Kumar shared his learnings, best practices, and recommendations.

MARKETING AND SALES CONTENT FOR PARTNERS

Christian Kemptner and Rajneesh Kumar shared insights on how Pimcore partners can leverage from marketing and sales content available on the portal.

FORRESTER KEYNOTE: THE ROLE OF PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Contemporary research shows the deep relationship between compelling, contextual content, customer satisfaction, and commerce. In this keynote, Forrester analysts George Lawrie shared data about the role and importance of PIM applications in ingesting, enriching, and syndicating content, to contact points on the customer’s path to purchase. 

Forrester also presented its best practice observations on PIM implementation success, plus the relationship between Product Information Management and Master Data Management. Information about trends, including so-called “headless commerce” in PIM and commerce technology, was also shared. It was a great session to learn which new skills you need to deliver content-rich, compelling customer engagement on behalf of your clients. 

E-COMMERCE SHOOT-OUT WITH PIMCORE, CORESHOP, MAGENTO, AND SHOPWARE

E-Commerce is a big topic for a digital experience platform. No e-commerce solution fits for each customer and use case. Pimcore can be used in flexible ways for various e-commerce scenarios. For advanced purposes and demanding B2B e-commerce and also for headless commerce, the integrated e-commerce framework is recommended. Then there is also CoreShop, an excellent plugin. And there are integrations for combining the PIM, DAM, and CMS modules of Pimcore with leading commerce platforms such as Magento and Shopware. With the Pimcore platform, you get unparalleled flexibility – whatever your e-commerce needs are. Our partners presented 4 different ways to do e-commerce with Pimcore; and each of them demonstrated capabilities with an example use case.

CASE STUDY PRESENTATIONS BY PARTNERS

Our 10+ eminent partners across the 4 continents shared the fantastic work they are doing for their clients using Pimcore as a platform. The session covered both the business and technical side of case studies. It was really a proud feeling to see how our awesome partners are building innovative solutions for their clients. Really cool stuff!!!

PIMCORE INSPIRE AWARDS

The event was concluded with the award ceremony. 

• The ‘best case study of the year’ award goes to Küche&Co / Otto Group, for elbkapitäne
• The ‘Partner of the year’ award won by Ateles
• The ‘Technology partner of the year’ is Real Objects
• The ‘most valuable Pimconaut’ award goes to Jan Walther
• The award for ‘best extension of the year’ goes to ‘Magento Connector’, developed by Divante

Many many congratulations to all the winners!!!

That's a wrap…!!! Thank you all for your tremendous support and chipping in for 2 days of thrilling experience. The conference has served the purpose of sharing the progress we have made so far and rejoicing the success of Pimcore mission: all together.

Next Pimcore Inspire Conference 2020 is going to be even bigger, bolder, and stocked with many surprises. We are aiming 700+ attendees for our next year annual conference. Tickets are already selling like a hotcake.

Looking to download the slides and video recordings of all sessions? They are exclusively available to our partners via the partner portal.